American Obscurantism argues for a salutary indirection in U.S. culture. From its earliest canonical literary works through films of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the most ...
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American Obscurantism argues for a salutary indirection in U.S. culture. From its earliest canonical literary works through films of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the most compelling manifestations of America’s troubled history have articulated this content through a unique formal and tonal obscurity. Envisioning the formidable darkness attending racial history at nearly every stage of the republic’s founding and ongoing development, writers such as William Faulkner and Hart Crane, and directors like the Coen brothers and Stanley Kubrick, present a powerful critique of American conquest, southern plantation culture, and western frontier ideology. American Obscurantism engages the basis of these explorations in Edgar Allan Poe and Herman Melville, each of whom present notable occlusions in their characters’ racial understanding, an obtuseness or naivety that is expressed by a corresponding formal opacity. Such oblique historicity as the book describes allows a method at odds with—and implicitly critical of—the historicizing trend that marked literary studies in the wake of the theoretical turn. The book thus restores an emphasis on aesthetic and medium-specific features to argue for a formalist historicity. Working through challenges to an implicitly white, bourgeois, heteronormative polity, American Obscurantism posits an insistent, vital racial otherness at the heart of American literature and cinema. It examines this pattern across a canon that shows more self-doubt than assuredness, arguing for the value of openness and questioning in place of epistemological or critical certainty.Less

American Obscurantism : History and the Visual in U.S. Literature and Film

Peter Lurie

Published in print: 2018-07-26

American Obscurantism argues for a salutary indirection in U.S. culture. From its earliest canonical literary works through films of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, the most compelling manifestations of America’s troubled history have articulated this content through a unique formal and tonal obscurity. Envisioning the formidable darkness attending racial history at nearly every stage of the republic’s founding and ongoing development, writers such as William Faulkner and Hart Crane, and directors like the Coen brothers and Stanley Kubrick, present a powerful critique of American conquest, southern plantation culture, and western frontier ideology. American Obscurantism engages the basis of these explorations in Edgar Allan Poe and Herman Melville, each of whom present notable occlusions in their characters’ racial understanding, an obtuseness or naivety that is expressed by a corresponding formal opacity. Such oblique historicity as the book describes allows a method at odds with—and implicitly critical of—the historicizing trend that marked literary studies in the wake of the theoretical turn. The book thus restores an emphasis on aesthetic and medium-specific features to argue for a formalist historicity. Working through challenges to an implicitly white, bourgeois, heteronormative polity, American Obscurantism posits an insistent, vital racial otherness at the heart of American literature and cinema. It examines this pattern across a canon that shows more self-doubt than assuredness, arguing for the value of openness and questioning in place of epistemological or critical certainty.

Screen Stories: Emotion and the Ethics of Engagement provides an account of the rhetorical and cultural power of storytelling on screens and develops an ethics of engagement that provides tools for ...
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Screen Stories: Emotion and the Ethics of Engagement provides an account of the rhetorical and cultural power of storytelling on screens and develops an ethics of engagement that provides tools for the critic to respond to that power. Screen Stories first provides a theory of the persuasive influence of such “screen stories,” paying particular attention to the role of emotion. The book argues that the emotions a screen story elicits are key to its potential influence, functioning as an incentive for spectators to “cooperate,” helping to facilitate transfer of beliefs from text to world, and spurring the cultivation of habits of thought and response. Screen Stories then argues for an ethics of engagement that considers the particular sorts of experiences screen stories offer and is open to their benefits as well as their drawbacks. In doing so, an ethics of engagement rejects what the book calls “estrangement theory,” which in its extreme forms focuses almost solely on critique, condemns mainstream films and television, and distrusts the role of emotion and immersion in the experience of screen stories. The book goes on to discuss the sort of ethical experience screen stories offer, examining the implications of character engagement, narrative closure (as an element of structure), and narrative scenarios and the characteristic emotions they elicit. Plantinga argues that an ethics of engagement is more relevant to the viewing of screen stories today, and thus has the potential to revive and enliven the discussion of ethics of storytelling on screens.Less

Screen Stories : Emotion and the Ethics of Engagement

Carl Plantinga

Published in print: 2018-06-28

Screen Stories: Emotion and the Ethics of Engagement provides an account of the rhetorical and cultural power of storytelling on screens and develops an ethics of engagement that provides tools for the critic to respond to that power. Screen Stories first provides a theory of the persuasive influence of such “screen stories,” paying particular attention to the role of emotion. The book argues that the emotions a screen story elicits are key to its potential influence, functioning as an incentive for spectators to “cooperate,” helping to facilitate transfer of beliefs from text to world, and spurring the cultivation of habits of thought and response. Screen Stories then argues for an ethics of engagement that considers the particular sorts of experiences screen stories offer and is open to their benefits as well as their drawbacks. In doing so, an ethics of engagement rejects what the book calls “estrangement theory,” which in its extreme forms focuses almost solely on critique, condemns mainstream films and television, and distrusts the role of emotion and immersion in the experience of screen stories. The book goes on to discuss the sort of ethical experience screen stories offer, examining the implications of character engagement, narrative closure (as an element of structure), and narrative scenarios and the characteristic emotions they elicit. Plantinga argues that an ethics of engagement is more relevant to the viewing of screen stories today, and thus has the potential to revive and enliven the discussion of ethics of storytelling on screens.

How do novels travel through time? How might they endure in a changing world in order to reach the unknowable readers of the future? Modernist writers were obsessed with questions like these, and ...
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How do novels travel through time? How might they endure in a changing world in order to reach the unknowable readers of the future? Modernist writers were obsessed with questions like these, and eager for their books to reach out to people, times, and cultures beyond their own. In recent years, scholars of modernism have focused on pinning them down: putting these books in their context and these authors in their place. We do so because we fear that any ambition to reach the future will make literature disengaged, irresponsible, and apolitical. We worry that literature cannot escape its own moment without also evading the hard truths of history itself. This book argues instead that literature can travel through time: not by transcending history, but by adapting to historical change. Each chapter pairs a modernist author with a reader who heard these old novels calling his or her name. In each case, these future readers are also novelists—who read with an eye to form and craft, and who put what they see to new use in their own novels. Their rewritings of the past treat the literary canon not as an object of antagonistic critique, but as a set of resources and tools to move new generations of readers.Less

Out of Context : The Uses of Modernist Fiction

Michaela Bronstein

Published in print: 2018-06-28

How do novels travel through time? How might they endure in a changing world in order to reach the unknowable readers of the future? Modernist writers were obsessed with questions like these, and eager for their books to reach out to people, times, and cultures beyond their own. In recent years, scholars of modernism have focused on pinning them down: putting these books in their context and these authors in their place. We do so because we fear that any ambition to reach the future will make literature disengaged, irresponsible, and apolitical. We worry that literature cannot escape its own moment without also evading the hard truths of history itself. This book argues instead that literature can travel through time: not by transcending history, but by adapting to historical change. Each chapter pairs a modernist author with a reader who heard these old novels calling his or her name. In each case, these future readers are also novelists—who read with an eye to form and craft, and who put what they see to new use in their own novels. Their rewritings of the past treat the literary canon not as an object of antagonistic critique, but as a set of resources and tools to move new generations of readers.

Animals seem to be everywhere in contemporary literature, visual art, and performance. But though writers, artists, and performers are now engaging more and more with ideas about animals, and even ...
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Animals seem to be everywhere in contemporary literature, visual art, and performance. But though writers, artists, and performers are now engaging more and more with ideas about animals, and even with actual living animals, their aesthetic practice continues to be interpreted within a primarily human frame of reference—with art itself being understood as an exclusively human endeavor. The critical wager in this book is that the aesthetic impulse itself is profoundly trans-species. Rohman suggests that if we understand artistic and performative impulses themselves as part of our evolutionary inheritance—as that which we borrow, in some sense, from animals and the natural world—the ways we experience, theorize, and value literary, visual, and performance art fundamentally shift. Although other arguments suggest that certain modes of aesthetic expression are closely linked to animality, Rohman argues that the aesthetic is animal, showing how animality and actual animals are at the center of the aesthetic practices of crucial modernist, contemporary, and avant-garde artists. Exploring the implications of the shift from an anthropocentric to a bioaesthetic conception of art, this book turns toward animals as artistic progenitors in a range of case studies that spans print texts, visual art, dance, music, and theatrical performance. Drawing on the ideas of theorists such as Elizabeth Grosz, Jane Bennett, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Jacques Derrida, Una Chaudhuri, Timothy Morton, and Cary Wolfe, Rohman articulates a deep coincidence of the human and animal elaboration of life forces in aesthetic practices.Less

Choreographies of the Living : Bioaesthetics in Literature, Art, and Performance

Carrie Rohman

Published in print: 2018-06-28

Animals seem to be everywhere in contemporary literature, visual art, and performance. But though writers, artists, and performers are now engaging more and more with ideas about animals, and even with actual living animals, their aesthetic practice continues to be interpreted within a primarily human frame of reference—with art itself being understood as an exclusively human endeavor. The critical wager in this book is that the aesthetic impulse itself is profoundly trans-species. Rohman suggests that if we understand artistic and performative impulses themselves as part of our evolutionary inheritance—as that which we borrow, in some sense, from animals and the natural world—the ways we experience, theorize, and value literary, visual, and performance art fundamentally shift. Although other arguments suggest that certain modes of aesthetic expression are closely linked to animality, Rohman argues that the aesthetic is animal, showing how animality and actual animals are at the center of the aesthetic practices of crucial modernist, contemporary, and avant-garde artists. Exploring the implications of the shift from an anthropocentric to a bioaesthetic conception of art, this book turns toward animals as artistic progenitors in a range of case studies that spans print texts, visual art, dance, music, and theatrical performance. Drawing on the ideas of theorists such as Elizabeth Grosz, Jane Bennett, Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Jacques Derrida, Una Chaudhuri, Timothy Morton, and Cary Wolfe, Rohman articulates a deep coincidence of the human and animal elaboration of life forces in aesthetic practices.

Looking back on her career in 1977, Bette Davis remembered with pride, “Women owned Hollywood for twenty years.” She had a point. During the 1930s and 1940s, the press claimed Hollywood was a ...
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Looking back on her career in 1977, Bette Davis remembered with pride, “Women owned Hollywood for twenty years.” She had a point. During the 1930s and 1940s, the press claimed Hollywood was a generation or two ahead of the rest of the United States in terms of gender equality and employment, with women constituting 40% of film industry employees. Mary C. McCall Jr. was elected president of the Screen Writers Guild three times, and a quarter of all screenwriters were women. Barbara McLean was known as “Hollywood’s Editor-in-Chief.” She and her colleague Margaret Booth supervised their studios’ feature outputs and could order retakes on any director’s work. One woman ran MGM behind the scenes. Over a dozen women worked as producers of major feature films. Edith Head told American women what to wear for decades. Executive Anita Colby, “ ‘the Face with a brain to match,” told them how to do everything else. But historians, critics, and the public have largely forgotten this period and persist in seeing studio-era Hollywood as a place where the only careers open to women were passive, pretty directors’ dummies on-screen or underpaid, anonymous secretaries off-screen. This book tells another story of a “golden age” for women’s employment in the film industry and of Hollywood’s ranks of powerful organization women.Less

Nobody's Girl Friday : The Women Who Ran Hollywood

J. E. Smyth

Published in print: 2018-05-31

Looking back on her career in 1977, Bette Davis remembered with pride, “Women owned Hollywood for twenty years.” She had a point. During the 1930s and 1940s, the press claimed Hollywood was a generation or two ahead of the rest of the United States in terms of gender equality and employment, with women constituting 40% of film industry employees. Mary C. McCall Jr. was elected president of the Screen Writers Guild three times, and a quarter of all screenwriters were women. Barbara McLean was known as “Hollywood’s Editor-in-Chief.” She and her colleague Margaret Booth supervised their studios’ feature outputs and could order retakes on any director’s work. One woman ran MGM behind the scenes. Over a dozen women worked as producers of major feature films. Edith Head told American women what to wear for decades. Executive Anita Colby, “ ‘the Face with a brain to match,” told them how to do everything else. But historians, critics, and the public have largely forgotten this period and persist in seeing studio-era Hollywood as a place where the only careers open to women were passive, pretty directors’ dummies on-screen or underpaid, anonymous secretaries off-screen. This book tells another story of a “golden age” for women’s employment in the film industry and of Hollywood’s ranks of powerful organization women.

This book traces the emergence of a sense of kinship with and belonging to a larger, more inclusive world within the law and literature of late seventeenth-century Puritanism. Connected to this ...
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This book traces the emergence of a sense of kinship with and belonging to a larger, more inclusive world within the law and literature of late seventeenth-century Puritanism. Connected to this cosmopolitanism in part through travel, trade, and politics, late seventeenth-century Puritans, it is argued, were also thinking in terms that went beyond these parameters about what it meant to feel affiliated with people in remote places—of which the Ottoman Empire is the best, but not the only example—and to experience what Bruce Robbins calls “attachment at a distance.” In this way Puritan writers and readers were not simply learning about others but also cultivating an awareness of themselves as “stand[ing] in an ethically significant relation” to people all around the world. The underlying source of these cosmopolitan predilections was the law, specifically the law of nations, often considered the precursor to international law. Through the terms for sovereignty, obligation, and society made available by a turn toward the cosmopolitan within the law, the Puritans experimented with concepts of extended obligation and ideas about a society consisting of all humans, not just those living on certain trade routes or within certain foreign communities. In mapping out these thought experiments, The Puritan Cosmopolis uncovers Puritans who were reconceptualizing war, contemplating new ways of cultivating peace, and rewriting the rules for being Puritan by internalizing legal theories about living in a larger, more inclusive world.Less

The Puritan Cosmopolis : The Law of Nations and the Early American Imagination

Nan Goodman

Published in print: 2018-04-26

This book traces the emergence of a sense of kinship with and belonging to a larger, more inclusive world within the law and literature of late seventeenth-century Puritanism. Connected to this cosmopolitanism in part through travel, trade, and politics, late seventeenth-century Puritans, it is argued, were also thinking in terms that went beyond these parameters about what it meant to feel affiliated with people in remote places—of which the Ottoman Empire is the best, but not the only example—and to experience what Bruce Robbins calls “attachment at a distance.” In this way Puritan writers and readers were not simply learning about others but also cultivating an awareness of themselves as “stand[ing] in an ethically significant relation” to people all around the world. The underlying source of these cosmopolitan predilections was the law, specifically the law of nations, often considered the precursor to international law. Through the terms for sovereignty, obligation, and society made available by a turn toward the cosmopolitan within the law, the Puritans experimented with concepts of extended obligation and ideas about a society consisting of all humans, not just those living on certain trade routes or within certain foreign communities. In mapping out these thought experiments, The Puritan Cosmopolis uncovers Puritans who were reconceptualizing war, contemplating new ways of cultivating peace, and rewriting the rules for being Puritan by internalizing legal theories about living in a larger, more inclusive world.

This book attempts to see the development of literary culture in sixteenth-century England as a whole and to explain the relationship between the Reformation and the literary renaissance of the ...
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This book attempts to see the development of literary culture in sixteenth-century England as a whole and to explain the relationship between the Reformation and the literary renaissance of the Elizabethan period. Its central theme is ‘the common’ in its double sense of something shared and something base, and it argues that making common the work of God is at the heart of the English Reformation, just as making common the literature of antiquity and of early modern Europe is at the heart of the English Renaissance. The book addresses the central question of why the Renaissance in England arrived so late in terms of the relationship between humanism and Protestantism and the tensions between democracy and the imagination which persist throughout the century. The first part of the book establishes a social dimension for literary culture in the period by exploring the associations of ‘commonwealth’ and related terms. It then addresses the role of Greek in the period before and during the Reformation in disturbing the old binary of elite Latin and common English. It argues that the Reformation principle of making common is coupled with a hostility towards fiction, which has the effect of closing down the humanist renaissance of the earlier decades. The final part of the book discusses the Elizabethan literary renaissance and deals in turn with poetry, short prose fiction, and the drama written for the common stage. In between, the middle part of the book presents translation as the link between Reformation and Renaissance.Less

Common: The Development of Literary Culture in Sixteenth-Century England

Neil Rhodes

Published in print: 2018-04-26

This book attempts to see the development of literary culture in sixteenth-century England as a whole and to explain the relationship between the Reformation and the literary renaissance of the Elizabethan period. Its central theme is ‘the common’ in its double sense of something shared and something base, and it argues that making common the work of God is at the heart of the English Reformation, just as making common the literature of antiquity and of early modern Europe is at the heart of the English Renaissance. The book addresses the central question of why the Renaissance in England arrived so late in terms of the relationship between humanism and Protestantism and the tensions between democracy and the imagination which persist throughout the century. The first part of the book establishes a social dimension for literary culture in the period by exploring the associations of ‘commonwealth’ and related terms. It then addresses the role of Greek in the period before and during the Reformation in disturbing the old binary of elite Latin and common English. It argues that the Reformation principle of making common is coupled with a hostility towards fiction, which has the effect of closing down the humanist renaissance of the earlier decades. The final part of the book discusses the Elizabethan literary renaissance and deals in turn with poetry, short prose fiction, and the drama written for the common stage. In between, the middle part of the book presents translation as the link between Reformation and Renaissance.

Emily Spiers explores the recent phenomenon of ‘pop-feminism’ and pop-feminist writing across North America, Britain, and Germany. Pop-feminism is characterized by its engagement with popular culture ...
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Emily Spiers explores the recent phenomenon of ‘pop-feminism’ and pop-feminist writing across North America, Britain, and Germany. Pop-feminism is characterized by its engagement with popular culture and consumerism; its preoccupation with sexuality and transgression in relation to female agency; and its thematization of intergenerational feminist discord, portrayed either as a damaging discursive construct or as a verifiable phenomenon requiring remediation. Central to this study is the question of theorizing the female subject in a postfeminist neoliberal climate and the role played by genre and narrative in the articulation of contemporary pop-feminist politics. The heightened visibility of mainstream feminist discourse and feminist activism in recent years—especially in North America, Britain, and Germany – means that the time is ripe for a coherent comparative scholarly study of pop-feminism as a transnational phenomenon. Pop-Feminist Narratives constitutes the first attempt to provide such an account of pop-feminism in a manner which takes into account the varied and complex narrative strategies employed in the telling of pop-feminist stories across multiple genres and platforms, including literary fiction, the popular ‘guide’ to feminism, film, music, and the digital.Less

Pop-Feminist Narratives : The Female Subject under Neoliberalism in North America, Britain, and Germany

Emily Spiers

Published in print: 2018-04-19

Emily Spiers explores the recent phenomenon of ‘pop-feminism’ and pop-feminist writing across North America, Britain, and Germany. Pop-feminism is characterized by its engagement with popular culture and consumerism; its preoccupation with sexuality and transgression in relation to female agency; and its thematization of intergenerational feminist discord, portrayed either as a damaging discursive construct or as a verifiable phenomenon requiring remediation. Central to this study is the question of theorizing the female subject in a postfeminist neoliberal climate and the role played by genre and narrative in the articulation of contemporary pop-feminist politics. The heightened visibility of mainstream feminist discourse and feminist activism in recent years—especially in North America, Britain, and Germany – means that the time is ripe for a coherent comparative scholarly study of pop-feminism as a transnational phenomenon. Pop-Feminist Narratives constitutes the first attempt to provide such an account of pop-feminism in a manner which takes into account the varied and complex narrative strategies employed in the telling of pop-feminist stories across multiple genres and platforms, including literary fiction, the popular ‘guide’ to feminism, film, music, and the digital.

The History of Russian Literature provides a comprehensive account of Russian writing from its earliest origins in the monastic works of Kiev up to the present day, still rife with the creative ...
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The History of Russian Literature provides a comprehensive account of Russian writing from its earliest origins in the monastic works of Kiev up to the present day, still rife with the creative experiments of post-Soviet literary life. Five chronological parts by design unfold in diachronic histories; they can be read individually but are presented as inseparable across the span of a national literature. Throughout its course, this History follows literary processes as they worked in respective periods and places, whether in monasteries, at court, in publishing houses, in the literary marketplace, or the Writers’ Union. Evolving institutional practices used to organize literature are themselves a part of the story of literature told in poetry, drama, and prose including diaries and essays. Equally prominent is the idea of writers’ agency in responding to tradition and reacting to larger forces such as church and state that shape the literary field. Coverage strikes a balance between extensive overview and in-depth thematic discussion, addressing trans-historical questions through case studies detailing the importance of texts, figures, and notions. The book does not follow the decline model often used in accounts of the nineteenth century as a change-over between ages of prose and poetry. We trace in the evolution of literature two interrelated processes: changes in subjectivities and the construction of national narratives. It is through categories of nationhood, literary politics, and literary life, forms of selfhood, and forms of expression that the intense influence of literature on a culture as a whole occurs.Less

A History of Russian Literature

Andrew KahnMark LipovetskyIrina ReyfmanStephanie Sandler

Published in print: 2018-04-19

The History of Russian Literature provides a comprehensive account of Russian writing from its earliest origins in the monastic works of Kiev up to the present day, still rife with the creative experiments of post-Soviet literary life. Five chronological parts by design unfold in diachronic histories; they can be read individually but are presented as inseparable across the span of a national literature. Throughout its course, this History follows literary processes as they worked in respective periods and places, whether in monasteries, at court, in publishing houses, in the literary marketplace, or the Writers’ Union. Evolving institutional practices used to organize literature are themselves a part of the story of literature told in poetry, drama, and prose including diaries and essays. Equally prominent is the idea of writers’ agency in responding to tradition and reacting to larger forces such as church and state that shape the literary field. Coverage strikes a balance between extensive overview and in-depth thematic discussion, addressing trans-historical questions through case studies detailing the importance of texts, figures, and notions. The book does not follow the decline model often used in accounts of the nineteenth century as a change-over between ages of prose and poetry. We trace in the evolution of literature two interrelated processes: changes in subjectivities and the construction of national narratives. It is through categories of nationhood, literary politics, and literary life, forms of selfhood, and forms of expression that the intense influence of literature on a culture as a whole occurs.

The idea of the fourth dimension of space has been of sustained interest to nineteenth-century and Modernist studies since the publication of Linda Dalrymple Henderson’s The Fourth Dimension and ...
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The idea of the fourth dimension of space has been of sustained interest to nineteenth-century and Modernist studies since the publication of Linda Dalrymple Henderson’s The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art (1983). An idea from mathematics that was appropriated by occultist thought, it emerged in the fin de siècle as a staple of genre fiction and grew to become an informing idea for a number of important Modernist writers and artists. Describing the post-Euclidean intellectual landscape of the late nineteenth century, The Emergence of the Fourth Dimension works with the concepts derived from the mathematical possibilities of n-dimensional geometry—co-presence, bi-location, and interpenetration; the experiences of two consciousnesses sharing the same space, one consciousness being in two spaces, and objects and consciousness pervading each other—to examine how a crucially transformative idea in the cultural history of space was thought and to consider the forms in which such thought was anchored. It identifies a corpus of higher-dimensional fictions by Conrad and Ford, H.G. Wells, Henry James, H.P. Lovecraft, and others and reads these closely to understand how fin de siècle and early twentieth-century literature shaped and were in turn shaped by the reconfiguration of imaginative space occasioned by the n-dimensional turn. In so doing it traces the intellectual history of higher-dimensional thought into diverse terrains, describing spiritualist experiments and how an extended abstract space functioned as an analogue for global space in occult groupings such as the Theosophical Society.Less

The Emergence of the Fourth Dimension : Higher Spatial Thinking in the Fin de Siècle

Mark Blacklock

Published in print: 2018-04-12

The idea of the fourth dimension of space has been of sustained interest to nineteenth-century and Modernist studies since the publication of Linda Dalrymple Henderson’s The Fourth Dimension and Non-Euclidean Geometry in Modern Art (1983). An idea from mathematics that was appropriated by occultist thought, it emerged in the fin de siècle as a staple of genre fiction and grew to become an informing idea for a number of important Modernist writers and artists. Describing the post-Euclidean intellectual landscape of the late nineteenth century, The Emergence of the Fourth Dimension works with the concepts derived from the mathematical possibilities of n-dimensional geometry—co-presence, bi-location, and interpenetration; the experiences of two consciousnesses sharing the same space, one consciousness being in two spaces, and objects and consciousness pervading each other—to examine how a crucially transformative idea in the cultural history of space was thought and to consider the forms in which such thought was anchored. It identifies a corpus of higher-dimensional fictions by Conrad and Ford, H.G. Wells, Henry James, H.P. Lovecraft, and others and reads these closely to understand how fin de siècle and early twentieth-century literature shaped and were in turn shaped by the reconfiguration of imaginative space occasioned by the n-dimensional turn. In so doing it traces the intellectual history of higher-dimensional thought into diverse terrains, describing spiritualist experiments and how an extended abstract space functioned as an analogue for global space in occult groupings such as the Theosophical Society.

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